Eradicating Invasive Species One Sushi Roll at a Time

MIAMI BEACH — Plenty of chefs have burns on their forearms, but Bun Lai’s battle scars did not come from hot oven racks. His were a result of an inadvertent brush with fire coral while scuba diving for ingredients off the Florida coast.

The payoff was a tub filled with pointy little whelks, mottled periwinkles, a few bright orange crabs and some chitons — oval mollusks that look like fossils with shells of interlocking plates. These would go on the menu at Prey, the pop-up restaurant he has been running for the last two months on the rooftop of the 1 Hotel South Beach here in Miami Beach.

Mr. Lai, 46, is a chef with a mission: to create sustainable menus that make good use of ingredients usually discarded or ignored, and, when possible, to exploit destructive invasive species like lionfish, Asian carp, Chesapeake Bay blue catfish, wild Everglades seaweeds and feral pigs. It’s a concept he honed at his home base, Miya’s Sushi in New Haven.

At a dinner last month, Mr. Lai served small bowls filled with citrus broth and those whelks, periwinkles and chitons tucked into a tangle of seaweed invasive to the Everglades. Alongside he poured sake infused with white pine needles, at once tart and sweet.

He tucked knots of pickled mugwort into sushi and shingled other ovals of rice with raw antelope, invasive to Texas. With his sous-chef, Luis Alamos, Mr. Lai layered fried blue catfish into sushi rolls, fanned slivers of raw lionfish on plates and slathered the moist flesh clinging to cartilaginous Asian carp ribs from Kentucky with a guava-based barbecue sauce. He used vegan cashew “cheese,” plantains, wild grape leaves and garlic mustard. His menu also includes wild noninvasive fish like Pacific salmon and sustainable line-caught albacore tuna.

The South Beach project came about thanks to James Sternlicht, a son of Barry Sternlicht, the chairman of Starwood Capital Group, which owns the hotel. (The group is not connected to Starwood Hotels & Resorts, which has been in the news lately.) James Sternlicht became a regular at Miya’s Sushi when he was a student at Choate Rosemary Hall, near New Haven, and finally persuaded his father to try the restaurant.

“I had an amazing dinner there last year,” Barry Sternlicht said. Mr. Lai “served me stuff I’d never order, and it was all delicious,” he said, adding, “He lives and breathes sustainability.” The hotel, too, takes a green approach.

Mr. Lai was born in Hong Kong and moved to Japan and then to New Haven as a young child when his father, a doctor, had an opportunity to do research at Yale. Mr. Lai’s mother, who is Japanese, started the restaurant in New Haven.

Mr. Lai thought about becoming a wrestler or an artist, then began helping his mother in the restaurant. “I always painted, and cooking was just a change of medium,” he said.

At one point, he tried to find work in other sushi bars, but well-trained Japanese chefs would not give him a chance, he said.

So he kept working in the family restaurant. Eventually, his family acquired a 10-acre farm in Woodbridge, Conn., to grow ingredients, leaving some of the acreage untilled to permit wild herbs to flourish. He also leased an area of Long Island Sound so he could forage undersea. His sister and brother now work at Miya’s Sushi, too.

At first, Barry Sternlicht tried to bring Mr. Lai’s restaurant to the 1 Hotel in Miami Beach in time for Art Basel, but that was not possible. So the opening coincided with the South Beach Wine & Food Festival. It had to be a pop-up on the roof since Tom Colicchio’s Beachcraft already occupied the hotel’s restaurant space.

The downside of the open-air location is that it can only operate in good weather. Mr. Sternlicht is hoping to make Prey a fixture. As it is, it will remain open until April 30.